


youtube.com/ALLCAP

by vulcan_slash_robot



Series: SteveTube [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff and Crack, Happy Steve Bingo, How To Become a YouTube Sensation Without Really Trying--an autobiography by Steve Rogers, M/M, Secret Identity, accidentally famous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 12:18:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16810450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcan_slash_robot/pseuds/vulcan_slash_robot
Summary: The thing is, Steve is pretty good with computers, really. And yet this whole mess happens because he fails to use one correctly in a small but critical way.





	youtube.com/ALLCAP

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not entirely sure I even made the deadline for Happy Steve Bingo with this one, but here it is anyway. For the "minor YouTube Celebrity" square.
> 
> EDIT: I COMPLETELY FORGOT TO THANK MY BETAS!! Huge thanks to Fury and Wynnesome for the last minute proofing. Any remaining mistakes or questionable use of commas are my own.

The joke, at its core, is that Steve is an old man who doesn’t understand all these new-fangled gadgets the kids use these days.

Or rather, that’s the way most people read the joke. Because the joke Steve had _meant_ to make, and makes so often, isn’t about tech, it’s about design. Steve thinks the graphic design in the StarkTab OS is too simplistic, and he’s played up his distaste for it into a permanent outraged huff that Tony knows is fake. Steve knows how to use a tablet. Steve just thinks the stupid hieroglyphics that represent his apps don’t live up to the beauty of the other things Tony makes.

The thing is, Steve is pretty good with computers, really. And yet this whole mess happens because he fails to use one correctly in a small but critical way.

It starts with one video.

The entire clip is barely twenty seconds long: filmed with a cell phone, the video opens on a tight shot of a brand-new StarkTab lying on a kitchen counter. Then, Steve’s hand drifts into frame, one finger outstretched to punch the power button with exaggerated deliberateness. As the tablet powers on, the camera zooms in close on one of the many icons on the home screen. The next few seconds consist of rapid jump-cuts from one icon to the next, shown at increasingly odd angles and absurdly close zoom, accompanied by a splattering of question marks and Steve’s own voice making incoherent, helpless noises. Finally, a last jumpcut to a shot of the empty living room. A beat passes, then the tablet flies into frame from below (as if thrown by the camera person) spinning like a frisbee and making a perfect, graceful arc into the wastebasket by the bookshelf on the far side of the room. Steve’s hand appears in the corner of the frame giving a thumbs-up, and bright yellow text spelling “20 POINTS” overlays the shot, filling the screen.

Steve films and edits this video shortly after the release of the newest StarkTab, after he’s had it for a couple of days. Tony will be in meetings all day, and Steve wants to send him this video to give him a giggle. His semi-fake-outrage is funny to both of them, and the tablet wasn’t even harmed during filming. (He’d stuffed a throw pillow into the wastebasket ahead of time, just to be sure.)

Except, the file is too large to send to Tony in a text message. Steve needs to host it online somewhere and send Tony a link.

So he posts it to Youtube, naturally.

It’s only 48 hours, two high-speed car chases, one brutal punch-out with Doctor Doom, and three million views later, that he realizes he hadn’t chosen the option to post it as “unlisted”.

Steve stares at the screen in shock for a while. He never had managed to send Tony the link--they’d been called out while it was still uploading. Tony hasn’t even seen it, this video that Steve had made just for him, but approximately three million strangers have witnessed “Captain America Learns to Use a Tablet Computer Correctly,” and youtube.com/ALLCAP has over two thousand subscribers.

Steve doesn’t know what to do.

He’s so shocked, his first impulse is to close the laptop and put it away, and hope that makes it stop. Then he chuckles at himself, because that isn’t how the internet works and he knows it. He does it anyway. Better to face this problem later, when he’s not so battleworn. He shuts down the computer, heads up to the penthouse, snuggles into bed curled around the best man he knows, and puts it out of his mind for now.

The next day, Tony is back in the office (cranky, sporting a black eye and with his right arm in a sling, but he’s got work to do and he’s _doing it,_ Pepper, calm down) and that means Steve is at home alone with the internet.

Dangerous.

He opens youtube and takes a look at the comments.

Also dangerous.

The comments on “Captain America Learns to Use a Tablet Computer Correctly” are mostly pretty standard. Most are simplistic, expressing that the commenter enjoyed the video; about ten percent are angry yelling and slurs that seem to have almost nothing to do with the content, and maybe a third overall contain personal anecdotes about a friend or older relative who can’t figure out how to use their own smart device.

But what Steve learns, which interests him very much, is that _not a single person_ understands that this was made by the real Captain America. It’s clear, once he realizes, once he notices the pattern in the phrasing, that everyone who’s watched this assumes he’s only pretending, that he’s making fun of the real Cap. They praise him for authenticity. “That throw!” they say, “dat arm so swol,” they say, which Steve is pretty sure he understands, and “wow that sounds so much like his voice”.

He stares.

He grins.

Oh, this is going to get him in so much trouble, but it’s going to be so much fun.

In a frantic rush to think of another idea, he lands back on his own gut reaction from last night. Two hours later, ALLCAP has posted its second video.

The second video is also short, following a similar style to the first. This time it opens on a shot of his hand holding a cell phone, with the living room out of focus in the background. It’s not his own phone, because he’s using that to film, but rather a spare--an older model, one of many that Tony keeps stashed in their apartment in case he needs something to tinker at. The screen of the phone in the video shows what appears to be a text conversation between himself and Tony. (This conversation is, in fact, fake, and is itself a video--created by JARVIS for the sake of expediency--and all Steve has to do in the moment is try to swipe his thumb along the line of the typing animation as his replies appear.) On the fake phone, a string of heart emojis timestamped as being from yesterday afternoon slowly rolls off the top of the screen as new messages appear.

 **Steve:** Morning honey! I made you a funny video. ;) [link]

 **Tony:** omg

 **Tony:** that tab was so young

 **Tony:** you monster

 **Steve:** Ha Ha! Wait. It wasn’t actually alive, right? I never know with you.

 **Tony:** it ain’t anymore, i guess.

 **Tony:**.................uh

 **Tony:** babe?

 **Tony:** did you mean to post this for the whole world?

 **Tony:** because it looks liek the whole world has sends it

 **Tony:** *seen it

From offscreen, Steve makes a small, wordless noise of confusion. The shot rotates sideways, as he sits up from reclining along the couch and turns to face the coffee table. He sets down the dummy phone next to his laptop and opens the computer’s screen. His browser is already open to a new tab, and he redirects it to YouTube. (Sharp-eyed viewers may note that the other open tabs include “how to google,” “what is a euro,” and “what’s wrong with this banana.”)

The shot punches in dramatically on the view count for “Captain America Learns to Use a Tablet Computer Correctly,” the subscriber count for ALLCAP, the tiny icon that indicates the video is public, and a few choice comments, with plenty of giant exclamation points superimposed over the footage and strangled noises of terror from Steve. Then it draws back, panning around the room as if casting about for options. Steve’s hand flails hopelessly at the bottom of the frame, held beseechingly palm-up, and his breathing in the background is melodramatically shaky and frightened. A chagrined-looking emoji with a giant sweatdrop flashes briefly over most of the screen.

After a moment Steve takes a deep breath as if to calm himself, and starts making soothing noises, shushing at the computer as if that’s going to calm the tide of viewers. His hand waves at the youtube window in a “settle down” motion. He closes the laptop, shushes it some more, pats the case, then picks it up and slips it into a bookshelf between an enormous leatherbound collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and a similarly august-looking edition of _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_.

He picks up the phone again and replies, “I fixed it.”

***

Steve knows what a viral video is. He’s familiar with the concept. He’s seen most of the classics, in fact. He can tell you with confidence the difference between the Charlie who bites fingers and the Charlie who is skeptical of magical leopluradons. Steve _knows_ about viral videos. He knows that sometimes they have sequels, and very rarely they are the start of something long and consistently successful, but most often it’s just the one video that gets a lot of attention, and then the person or people responsible are unlikely to be heard from again on any large scale.

So when he’d seen the original reaction to his first video, he’d thought “viral” and made the second as a sort of thank-you, as acknowledgement. He’d expected that to be the end of it.

Now it’s almost three months later and he’s got over 200,000 subscribers piling unfathomable amounts of views on his 30+ videos and he has no idea how he got here.

And _nobody knows_.

It’s not just that the viewers don’t know (and they don’t; it’s adorable, they go on for paragraphs sometimes praising his attention to detail and lauding the little ways his “character” is “subtly different from the real Cap”). It’s that _his_ people don’t know. Nobody who actually knows Steve Rogers has any idea he’s doing this. None of the people who’d know in a heartbeat that piloting a hoverboard around his apartment while aiming a camera down at his own feet and making noises of hilarity and distress as he careens into things is _absolutely_ the kind of thing the real Captain America would do; none of those people have the slightest idea he’s been flaunting that side of himself in front of oblivious strangers.

His channel isn’t _huge_ or anything, he’s no Kjellberg or Fischbach, not anything like a McElroy. You’d never hear about him on the news, but he’s got a nice respectable medium-sized following. A pretty serious hobby, verging into what could honestly constitute a career, if he’d needed the money enough to bother becoming a partnered creator. His viewers worry about that sometimes, encouraging him to get his share of ad-revenue or even start a crowdfunding campaign, but he assures them he’s got a day job. (When they ask what he does, he says he’s an Avenger, of course, and they send him winky-faces and laughing emojis in return.)

So it’s not really weird that the team doesn’t know, because why would they? There’s plenty of people on the internet making jokes about Avengers; no reason for them to have heard of this one.

Except then he starts getting the emails.

There’s no warning, no precursor. Just, one day in his inbox, a very formal and clear “stop what you’re doing” from Stark Industries’ legal department.

He stares at it for a while, baffled. He’s never actually lied, during this whole thing. He tells his viewers he’s the real thing, and they laugh. He doesn’t tell his friends anything, because they have no idea. He hasn’t misled anyone. Only now he’s getting cease-and-desist orders for defaming the image of Captain America, on behalf of Steven Grant Rogers whom we represent, and _how is he supposed to tell them_.

He tries, very hard, to phrase an email politely suggesting that they should ask Captain Rogers himself if he minds the videos, without actually stating that he is or is not, himself, Captain Rogers. He says, in broad terms, that if Captain America asks him nicely to stop, he’ll stop.

He feels a bit bad about it, but all he wants is for a lawyer to send a message to his official Avengers address (and not the throwaway gmail account he’d signed up for in order to use YouTube) asking him if he minds the videos, so he can say no.

This does not happen.

What he gets in return is an avalanche of legalese to the effect of “don’t tell us what to do, we represent clients and we represent them saying to knock it off”. Steve insists that when he hears it from Steve, he will, and they insist he doesn’t get to make demands.

It goes on for a couple of weeks before he cracks.

“Hey, Tony,” Steve says casually one night, leaning over the kitchen counter with his phone in hand and trying desperately not to live up to his reputation as a terrible liar. He crinkles his forehead in what he hopes is a convincing impression of himself being mildly puzzled. “Are your lawyers going after people for making jokes about me on YouTube?”

Tony slams down the clean frying pan he’d been about to put away, claps his free hand over his face and lets out a frustrated groan that’s almost a snarl. “Oh my god, is that asshole writing to you directly now?” he grits out. “Ignore him, I’m so sorry, he’s being difficult but we’ll get him to stop, I promise.”

“He?” Steve prompts. Shit, this is already going off the rails. _Play it cool, Rogers._

“Ugh, there’s this one guy called ALLCAP,” Tony starts and it’s a good thing he’s not looking at Steve because this is not going as planned, and Steve is pretty sure his guileless facade is shot. “He’s posting parody videos where he pretends to be you, and I’ll be honest, the impression is pretty credible, except he’s playing you off as being completely hopeless with anything digital or even electronic and I’m so over it, I filed him under ‘offensive and unacceptable’ for legal but he’s being a dick about it and I swear to god this is the last straw, he can’t be all shitty at you and then _run to you for protection_ , what the fuck--”

Steve feels like he’s been slowly imploding as Tony talks, crumbling in on himself a little more with every word. Because this is Tony’s righteous fury voice, this is Tony ready and willing to throw down for his Steve, this is Tony wading through an ocean of paperwork, his least favorite thing, trying to prevent a stranger from hurting Steve, from belittling Steve’s loss. And it’s sweet enough to make Steve feel guilty for causing this whole thing, but holy shit, it’s way too much.

“Tony,” he breaks in, “Have you watched any of these videos?”

“A few,” Tony tosses back, and then jerks around in Steve’s direction as he’s seized by a thought. “Oh god, don’t, don’t watch them, I don’t care what he’s saying to you, you really don’t need to--”

“Tony…” Steve sighs, exasperated, because how the hell has his _actual boyfriend_ seen the videos and not understood?

He pulls up the original clip on his phone and holds it up for Tony to see.

Tony grimaces at it.

“Okay, yes, I’ve seen that one, it’s not _that_ bad I guess but--”

“No. Tony. Watch it. Look at it.”

Tony does. It doesn’t take long. He looks up at Steve from behind the phone with an eyebrow raised, when it’s over.

He still doesn’t get it.

Steve scrubs a hand over his face. Okay. He circles the island to stand next to Tony. Gently, but firmly, he grips the back of Tony’s head in one big hand and restarts the video. He holds his phone directly over the part of the counter showing on screen, and points Tony’s face at it. Pulls his phone away for a second, still making Tony look at the counter.

“What…?” Tony tries, but Steve shushes him and puts the phone back in front of his face. He shifts their stance, anticipating the end of the clip, so that as the tablet flies across the screen, the two of them are facing across the living room toward the trash can it will land in. Steve pulls the phone away again, and, finally, Tony stiffens in his grip.

“Oh my _god_ ,” Tony breathes. When Steve lets him go, he’s grinning. “You _troll_.”

***

The next day, ALLCAP releases a video that features a shot of a man who looks very much like Tony Stark (at least from behind), and Steve’s fans immediately lose their minds. They want to know who he’s found to play Tony. He tells them, with angelic innocence, that it _is_ Tony.

The internet decides it must be Sergio Esposito, a particularly good cosplayer who’s won a number of Tony Stark look-alike contests in recent years. Sergio’s denial of his role in the video is met with just as much belief as Steve’s assertions that it’s just Tony.

***

Eventually, the channel gets big enough that the talk shows the Avengers occasionally appear on get wind of it. It’s customary for guests on such shows to be given a list of talking points to prepare them a bit--nothing too specific, but the moment Steve sees the word “YouTube” on the email from Fallon’s people, he knows what’s about to happen.

He makes a special video. (Careful, now that he’s learned his lesson, to set it to “unlisted”.)

The day of the interview arrives, and Steve can hardly contain himself long enough for Fallon to steer the conversation in the direction he’s been waiting for.

“Now, Cap,” Fallon picks up from a bout of laughter in the middle of their chat. He’s got that smile on that he gets when he’s about to pull something, bring up something embarrassing, and Steve’s own grin only widens. Here it comes. “You’ve been here with us all in the, uh, ‘future’ for a while now--”

“You think you’re kidding,” Steve breaks in at that phrasing, in too good a mood to be polite. “I still call it the future sometimes. Tony’s taken to smacking me with a rolled up magazine, because he knows I’m just being a smart aleck.” He mimes a swatting motion. “‘Bad Steve! You live here! This is the present!’”

That gets another ripple of laughter from the audience and has Jimmy leaning on his desk for support. (This anecdote is not quite accurate. Tony has been pretty insistent on Steve dropping the “future” talk, but it’s actually because Tony correctly interprets it as a sign of Steve’s displacement syndrome sneaking up on him. This is meant to be _light_ conversation, though, and Tony’s campaign to make Steve feel at home here and now has worked well enough that he can joke about it.)

Fallon takes a moment to collect himself. “Thank you, so much, for that mental image,” he giggles slightly, “Anyway, I imagine there was a lot to get used to, a lot to learn, when you first woke up.”

Steve nods along, trying to make the right face. The one that looks serious enough to acknowledge that they’ve mentioned something Not Funny, without removing the possibility of bringing the conversation back to a happier place.

“But you’ve had some time now,” Fallon continues, “And I’m wondering, first of all, if you’re familiar with YouTube?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Steve assures him at once. “I’m a big fan of the You Tubes,” he goes on, deliberately pronouncing it as two words and trying desperately not to fidget with anticipation. Fallon starts to say something else, but Steve can’t help himself. “I have my own channel, in fact.”

Jimmy stops short, shocked.

“You...you DO?!” he chokes out after a second. “What, you, stop the presses, oh my god this is incredible, what is it? What, what the _heck_ is Captain America posting on YouTube??”

“No no, I’m sorry, you had a question, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Steve defers, the words sounding as fake as they absolutely are. He’s grinning so hard his cheeks are starting to hurt.

“You, I don’t,” Jimmy flounders, “I had a whole thing planned, yeah, but now I need to know, the people need this, what is your channel?”

“No, please, I insist, what were you going to ask about?” Steve presses. He’s so far past not being able to keep a straight face, he’s not sure he’ll ever get the ability back.

Jimmy leans back, palms flat on his desk, squinting suspiciously at Steve and glancing at the cameras. His body language goes wary, he fidgets with his mug and adjusts his tie as he starts to explain about ALLCAP, the channel that lampoons Cap’s journey through the future via surprisingly believable impressions and has never once broken character, and Steve is trying so hard not to laugh he can’t breathe, can’t even think about breathing. It’s all Steve can do to let him finish the description before he squeaks out “That’s my channel!”

Jimmy rounds on him at once. “WHAT.”

“It is!”

“No!”

“Yes!” Steve can’t stop giggling, and Jimmy keeps wheeling around like he’s searching for answers, like he thinks he’s been had. “It’s true, I’ll prove it! Guys, roll the clip I gave you.”

The monitors in the room, as well as people’s screens at home, fill with the latest video from ALLCAP. It’s titled “‘Meeting’ the Real Captain America.”

It begins with a fairly typical sequence of Steve opening and starting his laptop, cut into a quick montage to save time. Open screen, pressing of power button, asterisks filling password bar, YouTube window opening. All shot as if from Steve’s point of view, just like always, his hands occasionally in frame. The video shows a series of emails, and bits of emails, talking about how great his viewers think it would be if he could meet the real Cap for a video. Then a string of YouTube comments in the same vein. Reddit threads. A couple of tumblr posts.

A set of familiar tuba notes plays as the shot pans back from the computer, resolving into the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme, just as Steve swivels his chair 180 degrees to face a full-length mirror on the opposite wall. He’s not in uniform, but it’s clearly, obviously him, Steven Grant “Captain America” Rogers, in jeans and stocking feet and a soft blue t-shirt with a picture of his shield on it. He makes eye contact with the camera in the mirror and cocks an eyebrow in time with the high piccolo note in the song.

The video ends.

*****

“How?” Steve moans, slouching forward to put his head in his hands. Tony rubs his back consolingly. “I told the truth!”

“You could not have sounded more like you were lying if you had tried, sweetheart,” Tony counters, but he leans into Steve’s side and puts his arms around him, taking the sting out of his words. He points to the screen of Steve’s laptop, where last night’s interview is replaying. “Look at that shit-eating grin. That’s exactly what you look like when you’re talking out your ass, and everybody knows it.”

Steve sighs heavily, which earns him a kiss to the temple, but no absolution. “I’m such a bad liar, I’m a bad truther, too.”

His plan had gone perfectly.

Except for how it hadn’t.

His various inboxes this morning were full of congratulatory messages about getting to meet Cap. About getting Captain America on board for a collab. Everyone’s so proud of him for having enough pull these days to get a real Avenger in one of his videos. They’re begging to see a photo of the two of them together. The “conspiracy theorists” who’ve been claiming for a while that ALLCAP really is Steve have gotten a little louder, but the majority dismisses them just as easily as ever.

“Now, I want to be supportive, here,” Tony says gently, rocking them both from side to side a little, “But I’m not entirely sure why this is upsetting? Did you want to be done with YouTube? Was this supposed to be farewell to the internet?”

Steve’s brow creases. “No.”

“Then this is good, isn’t it?”

Steve peers up at him, uncertain.

“Stop me if I’ve got it wrong,” Tony begins, “It seems like this experience has been very freeing for you, because everyone expects Captain America to be a sort of serious figure. Paragon of Virtue and Responsibility and all that. People love you, but they think of you as sort of...sober.”

Steve shrugs. That sounds about right, honestly.

Tony nods, taking that as permission to continue. “Originally the anonymity of your channel kind of gave you a chance to do whatever you wanted without worrying how it’d reflect on your existing persona, yeah? You kind of did an end-run around our PR team there, whether you meant to or not. Props for that, definitely, that’s practically a magic trick and I’m sure someone’ll want to yell at you for it eventually but it won’t be me, I’m impressed. Anyway.

“Then you wanted to tell everyone. Which, I assume, was because the feedback had been good and you decided to you were comfortable letting the public know that you really do know how to have fun, that you have a sense of humor--about yourself, especially. Here’s the thing though, babe: _you’ve still achieved that_.”

Steve pulls back out of Tony’s reach and lets a skeptically-raised eyebrow make his counterpoint for him.

Tony holds up a finger in a wait-and-see gesture, grinning deviously. “They didn’t believe it was your channel. But what they do believe is that you’re _in on the joke_ .” Steve squints a little harder. “Any time from now on that it’s a little too obviously actually you--or me, or anybody who wants to get in on it--in one of your videos, your fans are just going to take that as endorsement from actual Avengers of what you’re doing here. No more well-meaning Cap fans --such as my own dumb ass--claiming that you’re insulting a national icon, because _the icon himself_ thinks you’re hilarious.”

“You’re… not wrong, I guess.”

“But the _best part_ is that your secret identity is still intact. You can still do anything you want. There’s no danger of humanizing yourself too far and losing the ability to intimidate bad guys or motivate teens or any of your usual Captainly duties. You’re not going to ruin your own image, because you’re still not speaking as yourself. I think you’ve got the best of both worlds here, sweetheart.”

****

The next morning, another video goes up.

It’s titled “Captain America Learns to Use a FitBit”, which has nothing to do with anything; it’s just a suggestion Steve had drawn from his inbox. One of many little gadgets his viewers want to see him try out. The video is mainly various clips of his wrist, each showing the display on the workout monitor after an activity, framed so that it’s obvious what he’s been doing. One next to a set of weights, one on a treadmill, one at the edge of a swimming pool, and so forth.

His viewers will assume the absurd numbers are faked.

They’re not.

Well.

The ending scene where the little screen just flashes “TILT” over and over again as sparks fly out of it is a little fake, but it’s not done in post. It’s a fake FitBit that Tony whipped up, rigged to display whatever Steve wants and appear to short itself out on command. Steve puts “practical effects by Tony Stark” in the video description.

The viewers compliment him for excellent graphical effects work.

A week later, on the red carpet outside of a charity event, a reporter is asking them a few unimportant, humanizing questions, and when Steve mentions his morning runs, she teasingly inquires whether he ever uses a workout tracker or pedometer to keep a record of how far he goes. Steve deadpans that he had a FitBit once, but it couldn’t keep up with him.

ALLCAP gains two thousand new subscribers that night.

It’s the best.


End file.
